Radiant Textuality

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

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2. Introduction Beginning Again: Humanities and Digital Culture, 1993–2000

   1. Introduction Beginning Again: Humanities and Digital Culture, 1993–2000

      • Jerome McGann

      Pages 1-19

3. Hideous Progeny, Rough Beasts: 1993–1995

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 21-21

      PDF

   2. The Alice Fallacy; or, Only God Can Make a Tree

      • Jerome McGann

      Pages 29-52

   3. The Rationale of Hypertext

      • Jerome McGann

      Pages 53-74

   4. Editing as a Theoretical Pursuit

      • Jerome McGann

      Pages 75-97

4. Imagining What You Don’t Know: 1995–1999

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 99-99

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   2. Deformance and Interpretation (with Lisa Samuels)

      • Jerome McGann

      Pages 105-135

   3. Rethinking Textuality

      • Jerome McGann

      Pages 137-160

5. Quantum Poetics: 1999–2000

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 161-161

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   2. Visible and Invisible Books in N-Dimensional Space

      • Jerome McGann

      Pages 167-191

   3. Dialogue and Interpretation at the Interface of Man and Machine

      • Jerome McGann

      Pages 193-207

   4. Conclusion Beginning Again and Again: “The Ivanhoe Game”

      • Jerome McGann

      Pages 209-248

6. Back Matter

   Pages 249-272

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This book describes and explains the fundamental changes that are now taking place in the most traditional areas of humanities theory and method, scholarship and education. The changes flow from the re-examination of the very foundations of the humanities - its theories of textuality and communication - that are being forced by developments in information technology. A threshold was crossed during the last decade of the twentieth century with the emergence of the World Wide Web, which has (1) globalized access to computerized resources and information, and (2) made interface and computer graphics paramount concerns for work in digital culture. While these changes are well known, their consequences are not well understood, despite so much discussion by digital enthusiasts and digital doomsters alike. In reconsidering these matters, Radiant Textuality introduces some remarkable new proposals for integrating computerized tools into the central interpretative and critical activities of traditional humanities disciplines, and of literary studies in particular.

• Interpretation
• literary studies
• space
• literature
• space

JEROME MCGANN has helped to define the central topics in literature, theory, and cultural studies for the past twenty years. He is one of the founding members of U. of Virginia's celebrated Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. His most recent books are Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost (Yale UP 2000) and Byron and Wordsworth (Nottingham, 1999).

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